Maronite polymath, Custodian of the Vatican Library, and titular bp. of Tyre.
Born at Hasrun, he was educated from an early age at the Maronite College in
Rome. From 1715–7 he travelled in the Middle East, collecting mss.,
including many from Dayr al-Suryān in the Nitrian Desert. In 1739 he was appointed First
Custodian of the Vatican Library, a post he held until his death. It was on
the basis of the Syriac mss., in large part from Dayr al-Suryān, that he
compiled his monumental Bibliotheca Orientalis
Clementino-Vaticana, in four volumes (1719–28; repr. 1975, with
‘Postface’ by J.-M. Sauget; and 2002). This was effectively the first
European history of Syriac literature, and it remains an important resource
even today, thanks to the many extensive excerpts of Syriac texts. The
volumes are arranged as follows: I, Orthodox (i.e., Chalcedonian) authors;
II, Syrian Orthodox writers; III.1, literature of the Church of the East,
and III.2, history of the Church of the East. (III.1, 3–362 contains an
annotated edition of the verse catalogue of Syriac authors by ʿAbdishoʿ). The three-volume Catalogue of the Hebrew
and Syriac mss. in the Vatican Library was also compiled by him in
conjunction with Stephanus Evodius (1756–9; the Syriac mss. are described in
vols. 2–3). He was also the editor of the three volumes of Greek texts
attributed to Ephrem (1732, 1743, 1746; the three Syriac volumes were edited by
P. Mubārak/Benedictus). A list of his extensive published
literary output was drawn up by A. Mai, in Scriptorum
Veterum Nova Collectio III.2 (1828), 165–68; this includes the many
works left unpublished, or unfinished at his death (he had planned several
further volumes of the Bibliotheca Orientalis); some
of these were published posthumously (e.g., his monograph on the Patriarchs
of Antioch, 1881), while others perished in a fire several months
after his death. Ms. Vat. Syr. 389 is an autograph Syriac grammar (1707). He
also played a central role in the Synod of Mount Lebanon (1736).